Ankit Nagori's Curefoods Eyes Acquisitions Of Digital-First Food Brands

Curefoods Raises $13 Mn In Series A, Eyes Acquisitions In Online Delivery Space

SUMMARY

The round was led by Iron Pillar and saw participation from Nordstar, Binny Bansal, and angel investors Adil Allana, Rashmi Kwatra, Lydia Jett, and Kunal Shah

It has raised a total of $20 Mn to date and will be raising $10 Mn in debt funding in the coming weeks

CureFoods is a cloud kitchens operator which operates brands like EatFit, Yumlane, Aligarh House Biryani, and Masalabox

Curefoods, the parent company of cloud kitchen startup EatFit, has raised $13 Mn in Series A round led by Iron Pillar. Nordstar and Binny Bansal also participated in this round. Besides, angel investors Adil Allana, Rashmi Kwatra, Lydia Jett, and Kunal Shah also were a part of it.

Founded in 2020 by Ankit Nagori and Mukesh Bansal, CureFoods is a cloud kitchens operator which operates brands like EatFit, Yumlane, Aligarh House Biryani, and Masalabox.

Preceding its spinoff, Curefoods had to scale down its EatFit branch from 15 cities to three cities — Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Coimbatore. It now claims to be back on the acquiring spree and has incubated nearly 25 kitchens across four cities in India.

The startup will use the new funds to acquire many more digital food brands across geographies. In addition, it will also invest in building the backend technology to support its multi-brand, multi-city kitchens footprint.

With this round, Curefoods has now raised a total of $20 Mn between Seed and Series A round. It is also looking to raise another $10 Mn debt raise in the coming weeks.

India’s cloud kitchen startup is expected to cross $1.05 Bn by 2023, according to an Inc42 report. Besides giants like Zomato and Swiggy, who have entered the cloud kitchen market, Curefoods competes with the likes of Food Darzee, Healthie, Box8, Behrouz Biryaani, among several others.

The startup believes with the advent of many digital-first food brands, there is a large opportunity to aggregate them into a single platform and attain demand-side and supply-side scale advantages.

“Online food delivery in India is highly fragmented with almost no Indian-origin brands amongst the top ten across the country. In the next decade, there is an opportunity to build and incubate brands across cuisines on a meaningful scale. There will be multiple $50 Mn brands in the future in the online delivery space and we believe we are in a great position to build, acquire, and own many of them. Use of technology, precise digital marketing, profitable growth, and great brand building will be the key ingredients for success here,” said Nagori.